1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of telecommunications. More particularly, the present invention relates to a method and a system for communicating between parties, of which at least one party is an airborne party.
2. Description of Related Art
Conventional communications systems allow radio-frequency (RF) communications between an airborne party, for example, on an airplane, and a ground-based party. Due to the limited radio-frequency (RF) bandwidth available for an aircraft-to-ground link, only a small number of airborne callers can use such a system at any one time. When a particular aircraft-to-ground link is filled to capacity, calls from an aircraft are placed into a queue until a channel becomes available. This is inconvenient for some callers because the purpose of the call was to convey a short message to another party and by being placed in a queue causes the call to take much longer than should be necessary. What is needed is a system that allows an airborne caller to leave a message for a ground-based caller without waiting for an aircraft-to-ground channel to become available. What is also needed is a system that compresses messages, thereby efficiently using the aircraft-to-ground bandwidth.